Biophilia
by Rabbitprint
Summary: Post-P4 Golden, max Marie S-Link, Izanami/MC. Izanami-no-Mikoto has dealt with countless mortals over the years, but Souji is hard to relinquish - and the love of a god can be dangerous indeed.


_Post-P4 Golden, max Marie S-Link, Izanami/MC. Izanami-no-Mikoto has dealt with countless mortals over the years, but Souji is hard to relinquish - and the love of a god can be dangerous indeed._

* * *

She has had lovers before, men and women both, who whispered pleas and curses into the pristine folds of their kimono. She has had lists upon lists of her favorites: some who welcomed the honor, and some who did not. She has heard her name from lips that dribbled blood from death wounds, whose owners doubled over and clutched beslimed guts in their laps: _Izanami-no-Mikoto, She-Who-Invites, Great God of Yomi. Have mercy, oh Izanami._

The rattlings of their throats have been her pillow-whispers at night.

Her lovers have had other lovers, in turn. Devotion does not necessitate faithfulness. Izanami-no-Mikoto understands this cycle all the way down to her barest bones where the greatest mysteries lurk, where she becomes stripped of everything but desire and power, as a storm might thirst for targets for its lightning. Izanagi left her, and she bore a grudge against him for countless generations - until the hate turned to habit, so long that she lost the spite of slaying his followers and discovered a balance in it instead. She has swallowed that truth and allowed it to embody her. It is the blueprint of her fingerbones, her ribs, her spine.

Izanami kills humans. She loves them. She lifts them up and mends their wounds and watches them bleed out into blackness; she always has. She always will.

Scorn is Izanami's handmaiden. Her first husband spurned her. Mortals have cursed her in their rutting beds and their deathbeds alike, but she has always endured the cycle, just as she bears the knowledge that Souji - even _Souji_ someday will die. Even Souji will find other companions. He already has a rich handful to nurture, the fledgling seeds of his friends building gardens in his heart, so dense with branches intertwining that Izanami will dwindle away to the slimmest bramble, a summer's worth of easily-forgotten poetry and memory.

A mortal would deny that. A mortal _should_ deny that.

But gods do not exist as mortals do. The truth has changed everything for Izanami-no-Mikoto. Even as she wears the guise of Mariko, she thinks in terms of the divine.

* * *

Living within eternity is like living within the fog, air churning seamlessly to water: flowing into Izanami, flowing out. She lives and breathes an existence as diffuse as mist. Boundaries dissolve; she is both Izanami-no-Mikoto and Mariko Kusumi. Everything is important. Nothing is important. Time is an endless present, but nothing mortal lasts.

Humans approach the concept differently. In their eyes, life is limited to fixed quantities, clear boundaries, so once a body decays into soil it becomes the property of something else. Obvious beginnings, absolute endings. One thing stops. Another thing begins. To overlap is to merge; to unite is to fuse. Yellow and blue mix as green, and erase themselves in the process. Such are the restrictions of mankind, applied with wild indiscrimination to everything around them.

Humans see other humans as discrete containers, instead of seeing life flowing freely from one point to another. They hear _connected_ , and think in terms of finite parts. Humans hear that Izanami-no-Okami returned to her source, and think, _ah, so the pieces are together once more. There is only one god left. She is whole._

Izanami-no-Mikoto does not have the heart to tell Souji's friends otherwise.

* * *

Inaba is a place that Izanami has come to love with the fierceness of fire, encouraging its people to flourish, drenching them with rain and sun and hope. She tends them relentlessly. Eventually, she'll have to yield to caution, lest Inaba become known as _too_ blessed - but she'll risk drawing attention for now, while she's still too fresh to be involved in power struggles. There will be time for her to become jaded once again.

There will always be time, for her.

She nibbles her lip between weather forecasts, worrying about The Souji Problem. It's Golden Week. He's come back to town for the first time since the murders were closed, and she should take advantage of the opportunity, and she's _sure_ that everyone on the Investigation Team would be happy to see her - _but_. But.

Tiny fears coil in her belly like burrowing snakes.

 _But_ Souji's special to her. He's special in the same way as her favored attendants have been, the ones she's never stopped loving even when their skin has melted into the bellies of beetles and hungry maggots. Long dead and never to return, they've all left her behind. Mortals always do.

If Souji had been born earlier, she knows what his fate would have been: dressed in the white _jo-e_ robes of a priest, folds of cloth lapping at the bones of his ankles. Chin up, steady and firm as he waved the _harai-gushi_ wand in ritual blessing, paper hissing through the air. She can see him drinking sake as dusk crawled along a temple porch, one of his hands idly caressing the arch of her foot. She can envision his voice clearly in a cradle of branches and leaves, enveloped in the privacy of a forest as he whispered prayers into her ear to coax forth her benevolence.

But Souji was not born a thousand years ago; he was not born a hundred. He will never choose a priesthood. Not like this.

The power inside her stretches, rolls like a tidal wave of smoke. She senses Ameno-Sagiri rumble, surfacing like a pearl through gruel. _Make him into a Shadow_ , it whispers. _Make him yours for_ _ **centuries.**_ _The fog can do this._ _ **I**_ _will do it for you._

But Izanami-no-Mikoto keeps the god in check, soothing Ameno-Sagiri until it calms, and the nodule of its thoughts turns soft and shapeless again. It melts back into the haze, existing and not existing: part of her power and separate from her at the same time. Izanami understands these things so well now, now that she has her strength back. Now that she can see in the fog.

Yet her restlessness refuses to ease, and after one evening spent fruitlessly trying to befriend a coworker over dinner, Izanami finds her cravings echoed in the back of her soul. Boundaries blur, frayed away by yearning until the Okami's voice wakes her up at night, muttering and still resentful. The Okami may have accepted humanity's power, but accepting Izanami-no-Mikoto is a different matter, an old family bitterness. They will never be at ease with each other, not until humanity snaps out of its self-destructive obsessions.

The Okami hisses and snarls at Izanami's best attempts to placate her. They argue in the moonlight; they argue over breakfast, tiny fireworks of energy popping in the air over the sink. Izanami tries counting to ten. The Okami sets the washcloth on fire.

Irritated beyond any semblance of normality, Izanami calls in sick to work, and curls up in bed, wrapping the futon covers around herself like a worm huddled deep in the earth.

She can sense the buzz of foreign powers in her town. Other Persona users are visiting. With them, there is another force that stretches its thin fingers over Inaba - over _her_ territory, and she should be _outrageously_ offended, except that every time she lunges at it with her thoughts, it retreats like a cowed mouse. Not surrendering. Simply dodging until she's gone.

She's not in any condition to deal with all of this. She should meet up with everyone from the Investigation Team again, but she's not ready to see them yet; she's not ready to see _any_ of them yet. It's barely been over two months, and she can't do it like this. She can't.

* * *

Golden Week devours the calendar days, and by halfway through, all Izanami has to show for it is a stew of frustration as time - _mortal_ time - slips away too fast. Her apartment is too hot. Her shower is too weak. She sulks on the floor of her kitchen, legs bent up like a crushed grasshopper as she thinks about the many, many offers of company that she's entertained in ages past. So many lovers - so many people who have left her one by one, after offering themselves to her.

And what offerings they _were_. Supplicants giving themselves up to the goddess to be taken, and how indeed she would take them. Gods must be nourished too.

But there's only one person she wants with her right now, only one - and _he_ is someone she should know better than to claim.

Curled up in bed each night, Izanami can feel the whispers of the other gods, sliding in alongside her like cool fingers between the covers. Ameno-Sagiri's thoughts nudge sleepily beside her neck. Kunino-Sagiri presses against her belly. The Okami's harsh bones fit behind Izanami's knees and they all nestle together, a choral hum of mass divinity, as timeless as a coffin.

* * *

The sun of Thursday evening licks her blinds by the time Izanami finally peels herself out of her apartment, and dresses herself in white. Private fog cloaks her in illusions - she is a passing cat, a scrap of discarded newspaper, a shredded leaf - and gives her the freedom to walk through Inaba without worrying about smiling, or polite conversation, or pretending that she doesn't have an appetite for _life_ gnawing her hollow from the inside. Some days, it's easy to pretend she's human. Right now, it's not.

Inaba's prosperity is a gracious balm on her nerves. Tension seeps out of her gradually with each winding street, until her shoulders start to unhunch, and her ribs ease their iron grip on her lungs. She's just starting to finally rebalance her thoughts - untangling the way that they bite and twist like maddened eels - when she glances up, and sees Souji on the sidewalk.

His presence freezes her, locks her feet to the ground as effectively as a sacred incantation. He's here. He's _right there_ , and all she'd need to do would be to reach out and snatch him up.

As she exhales in ragged, short pants, Souji strolls past her, not noticing the way the breeze snaps an empty candy wrapper around Izanami's invisible legs.  
Automatically, she follows him, as helpless as a piece of fluff swept into his wake. There's no need for caution - he's given no signs of sensing her, and the mists are pulled as tightly as they can be - but Izanami does not trust herself. By right, she should consider him already dead. Dead and dust, that's what he is, walking bones and memory, even as he's smiling at passing strangers instead of her, and it _should_ hurt to know that he will go away too, him and all his friends who helped save her from losing herself so deeply that it would have been as good as a mortal death. It should hurt.

But not in the way that it actually _does._ Souji's departure should be all about finality and endings and _forever_ , and for Izanami, _forever_ is a constant that existed before he was even born, and Souji's leaving is only a reminder of the vast gap between them.

Izanami is different than Souji, mortal boy that he is. He's different from Izanami. And yet - he could come so close. He's been into the Hollow Forest, he's visited the Velvet Room. Out of any human she's met in the current generation, he's welcomed divine mysteries the most, and come out unscathed.

Loneliness screams at her to run, run _away_ from people, until she is never tempted again. Gritting her teeth, Izanami folds the emotion up like a newborn's skeleton, tucks it inside her chest beside her beating heart. Wrapped in the mist, she could touch Souji, skin to skin; he would never know. She could embrace him. She could run her fingers all over his limbs and soak up the heat of his body, painting over the scent of him with her own musky possession.

 _He should have been mine,_ the Okami whispers. In the corner of Izanami's vision, a patch of the mist congeals; a thin, pale arm glistens into being, fingertips first. Then the tendons, then the wrist, skin pooling like cream poured over ice, streaked with frost and fat. _If only he had given in. If only._

Izanami narrows her eyes, and twists around to grip the other god by the wrist. Delicate bones shift underneath Izanami's thumb. For a moment, the Okami starts to resist; then she relents, melting away so that Izanami is left holding nothing, and Souji continues to walk away unhindered.

Tohru Adachi was the Okami's best, the Okami's chosen one. Adachi had the power to bring lightning and blades crackling through the air, to lift his hands and call the shape of Izanagi to his soul.

But Adachi was not the only one with that affinity.

 _They both have Izanagi inside them_ , the Okami observes, rusty-tongued and longing. _But_ _ **my**_ _Magatsu-Izanagi is superior. Stained, as I am stained. Impure within, as I have been made impure._

 _We were better together, my Magatsu and I. Better than you and your favorite._

 _ **My**_ _Izanagi would have stayed with us._

* * *

The Okami's words hang on Izanami even after she slinks back to her apartment, avoiding Inari's shrine, dodging the glow of storefront signs as if the fluorescent light will burn. Clouds bumble together, struggling to block out the moon. By the time she turns onto her home street, a soft patter of rain is already coming down, spawning mushroom patches of brightly-colored umbrellas.

The Okami might very well be right. Tohru Adachi was flawed, but his very differences are what elevate him. Tohru, in his own way, _would_ be more suitable company than the Team.

Izanami bites her lip.

Knowing herself - knowing the _truth_ \- has slammed down walls between her and the people around her. To be a god is to be lonely. It draws a line between her and those she would call precious, those she would call a friend. Those she would claim as her own. Her best beloved.

There is a gap between them and her, and there will _always_ be a gap, a final area of Izanami's life that they can never touch, for to do so would change them forever.

So long as they are human.

Life creates itself wherever there is power. Human birth is a shallow imitation, a wad of flesh that progresses only in one direction from whelping to death. Gods have no such restrictions. Izanami-no-Okami was born from her, as were the Sagiri - and yet they are all distinct, despite rising from the same source of energy. Okami and the Sagiri and Mikoto. They all drink from a communal flood, but sharing power and sharing identity are two different things entirely.

When a new god is born, nothing is reduced. Nothing is lessened permanently, like a quantity of grain that must be parceled out into smaller and smaller bags. Marie could have been as strong as the Okami, if she'd only remembered how. But humans had derailed her; she'd tripped herself in circles on their lust for self-annihilation, until Marie had quashed herself blind in desperation, remade truly into Kusumi-no-Okami. Her death would have been a god's death: reduced to helplessness, her domain usurped, diminished into a dream that forgot it was even asleep. A corpse, for creatures that had none.

Dead. Dead and dreaming - until someone came to wake her once more, trickling life like hot wine into her mouth.

Her priests across the eras knew the right secrets. They whispered the proper words during _bunrei_ ceremonies, multiplying gods into endless iterations without contradiction, nodding their heads at the multifold _mitama_ souls of _kami_. They knew how to circle words around the soul, the spirit, and life itself, intertwining _kon, mei, rei,_ and _ki_ , connecting one to the other without confusing them as identical. But Souji and his friends are not trained in those mysteries. She does not think they would understand.

There are no beginnings. There are no ends.

Only mortals stop completely.

Izanami may play at being human, but in her heart, she knows she's already acknowledged the eventual loss of these children: another set of lovers buried even while they're still alive. She's said farewell, and yet, they're the ones who said it first, by being cruel enough to be capable of dying.

* * *

Golden Week ends. The other Persona users depart. Souji departs as well, slipping away, leaving a dull hole where he should have been, an empty niche in Inaba that never was addressed.

Izanami thinks of a thousand things she could have said to him, and none of them are right.

* * *

The next time Souji visits is thankfully soon: in summer, and all of Izanami's plans to be perfectly poised and confident evaporate like alcohol on hot stone. She hears news of his arrival from what feels like a thousand messengers: through the chittering giggles of birds, the eager stirrings of the breeze, the hairs on the backs of her arms prickling as if in a storm. His presence anchors her, locks her down, pinning her to a single train of thought like a clockhand endlessly spinning around its peg - _ruining_ her, the Okami hisses, but Izanami ignores the other god as she treks down to Dojima's, twisting her fingers together nervously as she waits at the front door.

Thankfully enough, everyone's happy to see her. Questions must be simmering in their minds, but exposure to Margaret and Teddy has tempered their curiosity; Izanami is not the only non-human in their lives. And more wonders await, from the gossip she gleans - Chie and Yosuke keep whispering about an anti-Shadow girl that was both a weapon and a robot. _Girls_ ; there were two. Izanami is not that strange.

She excuses herself early while everyone's still giddy from their Golden Week TV adventure, asking her for insight into the culprit that she can't summarize in simple words. A god's power would be potent in their arsenal, true. But there are balances to be observed within Inaba, balances between the living world and the realms beyond, and Izanami is relieved when the Team lets her withdraw without making her promise to uncover this stranger and annihilate them in a bolt of lightning.

The Okami does not easily rest while Souji is in town. Izanami manages to keep the worst of the complaints under control; she smothers the other god under a blanket of discipline and irritation. Her apartment has become a battleground that crackles with thwarted power. The neighbors blame the weather for the frequent electrical fritzes. Animals avoid her street. Even the occasional insects have fled.

"He may not want to spend that much time with us, even if we asked," Izanami-no-Mikoto snaps one morning, vexed enough to speak aloud. "It might not be something he wants. He _has_ other friends."

The Okami hisses bitter curses into Izanami's brain. _And what should that matter? It is an_ _ **honor**_ _to feed the gods._

Unable to deny the sentiment - but unwilling to agree - Izanami seizes the mists and wraps them around herself like a cocoon. She uses them to go walking invisibly each night, ignoring the habits of sleep and society; she uses them any time she has to step outside of her apartment, and Ameno-Sagiri grumbles louder and louder with each overly-liberal use of its powers.

It's only a matter of time. Eventually, the other god rouses and breaks loose, swelling out from between the cracks in Izanami's skin and eyes and teeth, gathering itself like an oily sea cucumber on the floor before slithering away. Izanami sucks air between her teeth, cursing in an archaic hiss, but it's too late. Ameno-Sagiri is gone.

After an afternoon spent whistling fruitlessly for the god, Izanami goes dutifully out to fetch it.

She tracks it down eventually to the Samegawa, where it somehow ended up haunting the river. The god is in scruffy condition, bobbing up and down while it balefully glares at the curious fish. The fish stare back. So does Souji, who is there on the riverbank, studying the fist-sized lump with an air of stoic horror.  
Izanami clears her throat, awkwardly.

Both the Sagiri and Souji spin to look at her. Armoring her courage with a sharp breath, Izanami mentally tugs hard on the other god. It swoops out of the water, shedding moisture resentfully in irregular drops, and wallows towards her 's a moment of cool sensation when it makes contact against her skin, like a soap bubble popping into light, and then the connection between them flows smooth.

The Sagiri's thoughts slide alongside her own, iridescent and gleaming with the shimmer of a thousand bluebottle wings, diffusing into bitter rainbows. The other god's shape dissolves. The prickle of energy gives Izanami a quick shudder, and she blinks her vision clear until she can see Souji's concerned expression.

"Sorry," she offers. "The Sagiri wander sometimes."

"Marie," Souji says, and she can hear the weight of uncertainty in the roughness of his voice.

She slides her hand quickly behind her thigh, hiding it on instinct, as if the Sagiri colored her skin like a sin. "Mariko," she says softly. "Or Marie. Or Mikoto. Whatever, it's okay."

Souji's gaze tracks and dissects her gesture. "Are they not a part of you anymore?"

"No. They are. But - " She breaks off, struggling to put a voice to every thought that's been sitting on her shoulders since Golden Week. "Okay, look. Humans hear _parts_ , and think of puzzles. Pieces that fit together to make a set, but aren't complete on their own. They think of... lives that only become whole once they're joined to another." Angry with her own incompetence, Izanami huffs out her cheeks, and rummages through her bag until she finds the ceramic teacup she'd started to bring with her to work, after too many bad run-ins with plastic. "Look at this. _Look,_ " she insists, and can't resist adding, an echo of her younger form in an ancient mouth, "stupidhead."

Obediently silent, Souji watches as Izanami produces the small, rounded teacup, offering it aggressively on her palm. She stoops without warning, swinging her fingers through the river and feeling the lip of the cup bump against the stones. When she lifts her hand into the air, liquid sloshes over the side, drenching her sleeve.

"Which part of the stream is the water?" she snaps. "If you take a cup out, is it no longer part of the stream? When you pour that amount back in, is it no longer a cup?"

Human words cannot encompass the mystery, though she tries to force them into proper shapes. Souji wrestles with them too. He understands the metaphor, but the simplicity is tell-tale of a trap: he can sense the paradox that lies waiting for him to dare it, as surely as a Shadow behind a door.

"It all came from the stream originally," he answers slowly. "So it should all be the same, no matter what."

Izanami rolls her eyes.

And - just like that - _hunger_ bursts in her gut, ripping through all the self-control that's been fraying thinner and thinner with each Souji-flavored thought. It rises up and sets teeth in her heart, raking it raw with craving, replacing sanity with an ache so strong that she nearly grimaces from the pain.

She can recognize it now, what she's been feeling all this time. It's the same need that drove the Okami to favor Tohru Adachi; it's a sister-kin scream in Izanami-no-Mikoto's own being. She _wants_ \- she wants _badly_ to transcend Souji past his own humanity, to pull him deeper into the realm of the gods and show him mystery after mystery until they take over his entire life. Souji already fulfilled one destiny. He could be part of so much more.

She can envision it so _clearly._ Souji would attend his mortal schooling and his workplace duties - and attend _her_ as well, learning arcane lore from lips that exhaled the sweet rot of the grave. The Velvet Room and all its stuffiness would seem like the merest stepping stone to the entities he would learn to bargain with.

She would show him everything. Wrap him in business suits and burial shrouds. He would wear folded haori and lie down with her in the cool darkness of stone caverns, in the secret places of the world that humans have not touched in hundreds of years, where even the dust has stopped stirring. She would bring him into a world where he would pace beside her in hushed hallways of polished wood, her bare feet padding softly to the measure of his heartbeats.

She would coax him along, step by step, and slip free his ties to anyone and anything mortal he ever knew, and by the time his physical life had been uncoiled, Souji would be able to say well and true that he _knew_ what it was like to be loved by a _god._

Izanami can _see_ it. She can see it all, and the desire nearly undoes her.

But she gives him something else instead: one of the secrets that her priests would have begged to hear from her lips, back when she walked the shrines and bells whispered at her passing. One of the sacred riddles that the gods know and breathe, a question that lived before language was born to speak it.

Instead of succumbing to temptation, Izanami stretches out her arm, and drops the cup into the river.

The ceramic tumbles and sinks with an inelegant splash.

"There," she challenges. " _Now_ , which part of the river is inside the cup, and which part of the cup is inside the river?"

* * *

Inaba's evening is warm and cloying. Humidity strangles oxygen out of the air; pedestrians pant and daub sweat off their skin. Izanami sits by the boundary of her window and the world, one knee folded, and listens to the hum of a hundred souls filling the street.

After his initial failure, Souji had fumbled through the usual answers - that the stream contained the cup, that the cup only held part of the stream, that the cup didn't even exist anymore - and got close enough that his ancestors would have applauded. His mind kept brushing up against the truth and shying away from it too, sensing the mass that waited in the darkness for him to touch it completely.

In the end, he'd backed down. Izanami can sympathize. She knows how terrifying knowledge can be, how it can yawn and hint at a chasm that will devour everything you have ever built up for yourself, replacing you with a stranger of its own devices.

Even what you know can be undone, through the liberation of amnesia. The option is always there.

The option is always there, and it is always tempting.

Because inevitably, one day - without even keeping track - Izanami will open her Mariko-shaped eyes to a world where Souji is gone forever. It _will_ happen and she cannot escape the inevitability of it, cannot pretend never meeting him, cannot ignore all those missed days spent wasted while she wrestled with what to say.

And, unlike her, Souji cannot be called back to life. Not as a human. Not in human form.

Souji will have to become something else instead - if he wants to survive her world.

Izanami opens the bedroom window that night, as wide as it can go, opens _all_ the windows, and climbs down without need of stairs or doors. Mist curls in affectionate tendrils around her legs. In the back of her mind, she can hear the currents of power flowing through Inaba, connected to the rest of Japan and other territories by spiderweb strings. Ameno-Sagiri has slipped out to watch Adachi again. Kunino-Sagiri remains unmade. Izanami-no-Okami has resumed dormancy, muttering and hissing in her sleep.

But the Okami will live the next time that the world beckons her, and even Kunino-Sagiri will rise at the right command. And new gods may birth themselves too, bridging off from Izanami-no-Mikoto's essence, part of her and _not_ part of her in the vast currents of _life_ they all float upon, gods and Shadows and Residents of the Velvet Room alike. They all swim upon that collective unconscious of humanity that births and devours endlessly, as Izanami herself does, not alive by human limits and not dying either: dead, but eternally immortal.

Izanami pulls off her shoes and walks barefoot along the road, letting the fog conceal her as she feels asphalt on her skin - asphalt instead of gleaming wood, streetlights instead of candles, stop signs instead of _shimenawa_. She revels in it while she can. Her Kusumi form will not be able to stay in the human world forever; Mariko's body may mimic the process of aging, but inevitably it too will be expected to end, and then Izanami will have to find a new avatar to wear.  
Even in that tiny, Mariko-lifespan, so many people will come in her life, and so many people will go. All the people here will grow older, streaming together in a tapestry of human faces; they will imitate the gods themselves without knowing it, merging into a whole while remaining distinct.

She loves them, in all their strengths and frailties. She will never stop.

So few know Izanami's true self now. Once the Investigation Team is gone, it may be generations before someone else recognizes her again. Izanami is a god enshrined in a television station instead of a temple, and whose fledgling priest wears a school uniform instead of robes - and who might not choose to be her priest at all, in the end. Souji wasn't able to answer her water-riddle. The next time she presents it to him, the lack of a solid answer will not be so innocuous.

Yet her small manipulations may already be enough. The thoughts she shared may take root inside Souji's soul, and he might return to her in some form after his mortal death - or perhaps his dreams will cling to the world of the Midnight Channel, and give rise to a new Shadow that will wear a folded mask and a jacket of the finest leather. Perhaps the sweet smell of ancient decay will envelop Izanami-no-Mikoto entirely, and she will have a partner to waltz with again, another temporary lover, to repeat the cycle endlessly of loss and lust. Perhaps Souji will choose the right river, choose the right cup, and show up on her door one day with a gift of living water.

Someday, Souji may die.

Someday, Souji may never die.

Until then, Izanami walks the streets of her temple-town, and waits for the next Izanagi.


End file.
